THE BURTON AFFAIR

At their first face-to-face rehearsal, on the set of Cleopatra, Richard Burton turned up drunk. He could barely walk. His hands shook as he tried to sip hot coffee from a cup. Seeing his difficulty, Elizabeth Taylor helped by holding the cup to his lips. She ultimately claimed that with this one simple gesture, a bond was forged; Liz took notice of Burton and found in him many of the traits she had formerly identified in her late husband, Mike Todd; power, strength, intellect and vulnerability.

Richard Burton's first amorous opportunity came during the third week of January, 1962, after he and Elizabeth had started to shoot their initial scenes together in their roles as Marc Anthony and Cleopatra. Several actors and crew members recalled Burton briskly striding onto the set one morning and informing them that he had "nailed" Elizabeth Taylor the night before in the back seat of his Cadillac. Taylor's husband, Eddie Fisher, heard the rumors and observed the strange expressions he elicited during his rare appearances at Cinecitta, the Italian studio where Cleopatra was being shot. He attributed most of the talk to tabloid journalists and 20th Century Fox public relations specialists who wished to exploit all the gossip purely to draw attention to the film.

Looking back, Fisher admitted having placed too much faith in his wife and too little in himself. "The husband is always the last to know," he complained. "I blocked out every suspicion until the night Bob Abrams, a friend who had come to visit me in Rome, gave me a telephone call. Elizabeth and I were in bed going over her lines for the following day, and the phone rang just as we turned out the lights. 'Eddie,' Bob said, 'I think there's something you ought to know. People are talking about Elizabeth and Richard Burton.'

"'What are they saying?'

"Bob told me everything. After I hung up, I lay in the dark next to Elizabeth. 'Is it true that you and Richard Burton are seeing each other?' I asked.

"Elizabeth hesitated before responding. 'Yes,' she answered softly."

Fisher spent the night in downtown Rome in a small apartment with Bob Abrams.

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When Fisher returned to Villa Papa, the couple's home in Italy, he received a shabby reception from Elizabeth, who took undue pleasure in chiding and torturing him. "She seemed to delight in teasing me, trying to make me jealous," Fisher wrote in his autobiography. "A little tipsy when she got back from the studio, just to get a reaction from me, she said: 'Guess what I did? I had a fitting with Irene [Sharaff) and then I had a drink with Richard.' "

Fisher, a little tipsy himself, "sipping vodka while waiting for her to come home," asked her: "What else did you do, Elizabeth?" She added nothing; and they ate dinner in silence. Fisher didn't tell her that he had acquired a gun, courtesy of a friend. "The friend told me to use it on Burton - 'no judge in the world will convict you, especially in Italy. Why, they'll stand up and cheer - a gentleman defending his honor. They'll make a national hero of you.' I stored the gun in the glove department of my car, realizing that I could never use it.

"I told Elizabeth I would gladly spend time at our new home in Gstaad, Switzerland, thereby permitting her the opportunity to straighten out her priorities. She didn't want me to go - 'Don't leave me, Eddie,' she pleaded. 'You must stay and help me exorcise this cancer.'" The statement suggested to Fisher that he still had an outside chance, that his wife considered Burton - with his wife and children - as something of a dangerous illness from which she hoped to be purged. Fisher stayed. "He was grasping for straws," said actor John Valva. "He hoped that Burton's familial conscience would emerge or that Elizabeth might realize the error of her ways.

"What spoke against the second possibility was Liz's sobering admission to me in Rome that she now realized she had married Eddie Fisher only because she had hoped to resurrect the ghost of Mike Todd."

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Once Richard Burton's family - his brothers and sisters - were made aware of his involvements with Elizabeth, they were protective of Sybil, who remained largely unaware of her husband's latest conquest. On a train ride from Rome to Naples, Richard's brother, Ifor Jenkins, became so incensed over Burton's licentious behavior that he punched Richard in the nose.

Still, Burton's overactive libido continued to lead him astray. Dale Wasserman, one of the original screenwriters of Cleopatra, traveled to Rome to discuss "a new film project with Richard. We had a few of those four-martini luncheons and each time wound up talking about women. It had become common knowledge by this point that he and Elizabeth Taylor were heavily involved. He began speaking about Liz, adding that he had no intention of marrying her. 'Marry that girl,' he said. 'Never!' I had the impression he meant it.

"I also had the feeling he preferred women en masse; I'm not implying he took more than one woman to bed at a time, only that he enjoyed variety. Whenever we met for lunch, he asked the names of the newest Hollywood starlets. What did they look like, which studios had signed them, and so forth. What were their sexual proclivities? He would record names and notes on a paper napkin, which he then stuffed in his billfold for future reference."

According to John Valva, Richard Burton swung back and forth like a pendulum between his wife and Elizabeth Taylor. "One day Richard would say, 'I'm leaving Sybil and going off with Elizabeth.' And then he would say 'I can't leave Sybil. I'm not going to see Elizabeth anymore.'

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By mid-February 1962, the scandal had reached its pinnacle. Eddie Fisher had dishonored himself in everyone's eyes by telephoning Sybil Burton and telling her what she already knew: "Your husband and my wife appear to be deeply involved."That evening, Sybil reproached Richard for the first time. Fisher escaped Rome for several days. Calling his wife from Florence, Eddie was startled to hear Burton's voice on the other end of the line. "What're you doing in my home?" Fisher asked. "What do you think I'm doing?" Burton responded. "I'm ------ your wife."

During Eddie Fisher's absence, John Valva had spent a weekend trying to look after Elizabeth Taylor at her Roman villa. "She was inconsolable," Valva said. "Richard Burton had pulled another of his guilt-trip departures, romancing Elizabeth and then returning to Sybil. Liz and I were sitting on her bed discussing the situation when, without a word, she rose and ran toward a plate-glass window overlooking the garden below. The plate glass was hidden behind drapes, and Elizabeth smashed into the center divider and bounced back, sustaining a number of cuts and bruises.

"I cleaned up her wounds and put her into bed, then fell asleep next to her. I awoke in the middle of the night and saw she wasn't there. Alarmed, I searched the house and found her downstairs in the kitchen. The first thing I noticed was this big knife in her hand; my immediate impression was that she might attempt to kill herself. When I saw she was only making a Swiss cheese sandwich, I felt a great surge of relief.

"A few weeks later, while on a weekend trip with Burton, she did try to commit suicide by swallowing some 30 sleeping pills. She had to be taken to the hospital to have her stomach pumped. 20th Century Fox tried to cover up the incident by announcing that Taylor had endured a severe case of food poisoning. During her two-day hospital stay, Eddie Fisher again reappeared, looking more in need of health care than Elizabeth."

One of the last functions Eddie and Liz hosted was a big party for Kirk Douglas in the ballroom of the Grand Hotel. Richard Burton sat to Taylor's left; Fisher, to her right. She and Burton were so enamored of each other, they could barely restrain touching. They clasped hands and played footsie under the table. Fisher couldn't help but notice.

By March 19, Fisher finally gathered his personal belongings and returned to New York, where he checked into the Pierre Hotel. "His friends saw to it that he wasn't left alone," said Ken McKnight, who stayed with him at the Pierre. "The most difficult job was to hold the press at bay. Like ants at a picnic, they were everywhere. As for Eddie, he couldn't stop exalting Elizabeth Taylor, recounting her skills as a lover, her sensuousness and beauty. 'Why don't you give it a rest?' I admonished him. 'You're torturing yourself for no reason. After all, you're the guy from South Philadelphia who wound up marrying Elizabeth Taylor. That's like winning the lottery 10 times in a row.' "

At the same time Eddie Fisher departed for the States, Sybil Burton took her two young daughters and left for London. Dick and Liz were together at last. "The bottom line," said Stephanie Wanger, daughter of Cleopatra producer Walter Wanger and a regular weekend visitor on the set, "is they were deeply in love. It was the real thing, and everybody knew it. As a couple, they fit well together. They had a rapport, and all Rome seemed to be caught up in the romance. It became what Camelot ought to have been for Jack and Jackie Kennedy."

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Coming Wednesday in Lifestyle: An Abused Spouse.

From Liz: An Intimate Biography of Elizabeth Taylor by C. David Heymann. (c) 1995, C. David Heymann. Published by arrangement with Carol Publishing Group. A Birch Lane Press Book. Distributed by Los Angeles Times Syndicate.